Future plans and milestones

Apart from the stuff mentioned in Software design, I want to give everybody a bit of information on athe future of kotnetcli.

Some general thoughts

The first version of kotnetcli was written in shell script. This version was for my own use only and never published. I then re-wrote kotnetcli to learn Python. Every time I modified kotnetcli, I looked at my old code and only one thing came to mind:

Wow, this looks ugly.

Over the last couple of years, I've learnt a lot, but I'm sure that I can improve even more. The project is currently maintained by some other developers (most notably Jo Van Bulck) and me. I see great opportunity in this collaboration, but kotnetcli should be a program that I understand from A to Z at all times. Because of this, I ask all developers to:

• Code as much in Dutch as possible. This means that stuff like comments, method names, class names, variables, should be written in Dutch. I understand that some English terminology is established in coding, so I won't be too strict concerning those things (e.g. comments instead of commentaar, PlaintextCommunicator instead of GewonetekstCommunicator).
• Comment every piece of code that might be hard to understand for a novice coder. If in doubt: write one.

All stuff on GitHub will stay English. The kotnetcli frontend is currently written in Dutch, but this might change in the future. Multiple language support is on the way, which means that we'll be able to sense the system's locale and set the frontend language accordingly.

Milestones

2.0

I want version 2.0 to feel complete. That means that:

• All functions (-i, -o, -!, -1, -0, should work)
• The worker method should throw the right exceptions. The communicator method should communicate them.
• The communicators should be cleaned up
• Exit codes will show up
• A --debug flag is included
• It runs on the three big platforms (Linux, Windows, Mac OS)
• It is as stable as testable.

This will be it for version 2.0.

3.0

Version 3.0 is still mouldable. Feature requests are welcome here.

• Language support: at least:
  • en
  • de
  • fr
  • nl
• Aesthetically pleasing code: consistent spacing, importing, ...
• Multiple frontends: Android app, Gnome Shell indicator, dialog-based login menu, ...
• Proper documentation
• Cleaned up wiki, revised README.md
• Removal of the --dummy-login and --dummy-logout flags from the end-user kotnetcli.py frontend (through the use of a dummy testing frontend)